HAYDN: The Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America
Volume 10 Number 1 Spring 2020 Article 3
March 2020
Caryl Clark and Sarah Day O'Connell, eds. The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia
Denis McCaldin Director, Haydn Society of Great Britain
Follow this and additional works at: https://remix.berklee.edu/haydn-journal
Recommended Citation McCaldin, Denis (2020) "Caryl Clark and Sarah Day O'Connell, eds. The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia," HAYDN: The Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America: Vol. 10 : No. 1 , Article 3. Available at: https://remix.berklee.edu/haydn-journal/vol10/iss1/3
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Research Media and Information Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in HAYDN: The Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America by an authorized editor of Research Media and Information Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse1 By Halvor K. Hosar
I. Introduction
The theories of William Caplin, James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy have done much to revitalize the dormant Formenlehre tradition, by devising new analytical methods that allow for a more detailed understanding of musical form in late eighteenth-century music than has hitherto been possible.2 Despite the novelty of many of their ideas, their theories are remarkably conservative with regards to the repertoire discussed: while providing an abundance of useful material, Hepokoski and Darcy do not present any unified framework that can be used to understand non- sonata-form works, and Caplin's treatise is limited to discussing the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in the period 1780–1810. Despite this, the latter theory holds great promise for understudied repertoires owing to its bottom-up perspective, where musical themes are explained as the result of concatenations of formal functions, arising from the juxtaposition of melodic groupings and harmonic content,3 and larger musical forms are understood as being created from a succession of themes. Though firmly rooted in the tradition of sonata-form analysis, Caplin also shows that theme-and-variation form, minuet and trio and what he calls large ternary form are all constructed from the same intra-thematic musical procedures as sonata forms. This provides hope for those interested in music traditionally neglected by theorists, as the theory allows for the systematic creation of genre-specific formal taxonomies independent of pre-existing models. The validity of this endeavor for vocal music has been shown in the work of Nathan John Martin, whose studies of operatic arias by Haydn and Mozart suggest that these are largely governed by the same manipulation of harmonic-melodic constructions as contemporaneous instrumental music.4
1 I would like to thank Prof. Ståle Kleiberg, for his support and for stimulating conversations stretching several years back, and without which this article could never have been written, and Prof. W. Dean Sutcliffe and Dr. Michael Henry Weiss, whose challenges to earlier versions of this article have prevented me from making many an embarrassing error.
2 William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
3 The relevant concepts are summed up in William E. Caplin, “What are Formal Functions?,” Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre, edited by Pieter Bergé (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 21-40.
4 Nathan John Martin, “Formenlehre Goes to the Opera: Examples from Armida and Elsewhere,” Studia
2 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
This article will provide some examples of how a form-functional approach can help us to understand late-eighteenth-century Viennese Kyrie movements, by providing a basic taxonomy of formal strategies found in such movements that are foreign to instrumental sonata-form movements. The Kyrie movement in Haydn's Theresienmesse is the main object of study; it has proven surprisingly resilient to analysis consistent with sonata-form procedures which, with a certain dose of pragmatism, have been applied to his other Kyrie settings with little trouble. This study suggests that the work employs a particular set of intra-generic formal types and rhetorical norms that are commonly employed in Kyrie settings, which Haydn obscures, but in doing so, he confirms their structural validity. This demands that one look beyond the traditional sonata form, and consider the generic norms encountered in Kyrie settings.
I begin with a review of previous analyses of this movement, and thereafter look at three aspects of Kyrie movements that previously have been largely neglected: introductions, and how they differ from their instrumental counterparts; the interplay between text and form, including how a middle “Christe” section differs from a conventional development;5 and the mixing of sonata and fugal expositions. Finally, these insights are combined, to give a new reading of the movement in question.
II. The Theresienmesse Kyrie: A Historiography
The Kyrie movement of the Theresienmesse has been analyzed numerous times, beginning with Alfred Schnerich’s attempt in 1892. Published English- and German-language analyses are listed in Table 1.6 Most of these analyses are very short and terse, and some conjecture (in brackets) had
Musicologica, number 51 (2010), issue 3/4, 388-404; “Formenlehre Goes to the Opera: Examples from Don Giovanni,” Mozart in Prague: Proceedings of the International Conference of the Mozart Society of America and the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, 9–13 June 2009, Prague, edited by Kathryn Libin (Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2016), 371-402; “Mozart’s Sonata-Form Arias,” Formal Functions in Perspective: Essays in Musical Form from Haydn to Adorno, edited by Steven Vande Moortele et al. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 37-76.
5 The question of how to indicate whether one is discussing texts, movements or movement sections remains a perennial problem in discussions of sacred music. Here, movement sections setting a particular text are given in quotation marks whereas full movements are indicated in plain text.
6 Alfred Schnerich, Der Messen-Typus von Haydn bis Schubert (Vienna, 1892); Alfred Schnerich, “Das hundertjährige Jubileum von Haydn's Theresienmesse,” Der Kirchenchor, volume 29 (1899), 93; Alfred Schnerich, Messe und Requiem seit Mozart und Haydn (Vienna: C. W. Stern Verlag, 1909), 24; Carl Ferdinand Pohl and Hugo Botstiber, Jopseh Haydn (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1878-1927), volume 3, 531; Carl Maria Brand, Die Messen von
3 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
to be made, as theorists have been surprisingly reluctant to tackle the movement in a thorough manner. More often than not, analyses are little more than a collection of fragmented observations, ultimately leaving the task of connecting them into wholes to the reader. However, when taken together they provide valuable snapshots of how the understanding of the movement has changed.
Over time, two main ways of interpreting the movement have surfaced. In late-nineteenth-century German accounts, the movement was regarded as a fugue surrounded by a recurring adagio; the “Christe” section was seen as a soloistic break constituting a structural episode, though not in the fugal sense. This reading is occasionally still referenced. In 1955, H. C. Robbins Landon noted that the section resembled the secondary theme of a sonata-form movement. This began a new tradition of seeing the movement as a sonata form. Cornell Jesse Runestad, following Landon’s lead, was the first to explicitly label the fugal exposition and “Christe” theme “first” and “second” themes, respectively, and he identified the split between the development and the recapitulation. Later writers have generally followed Runestad, and whatever details have been added have largely been done as a consequence of what had previously been established. It is interesting that Landon
Joseph Haydn (Würzburg: Konrad Triltsch Verlag, 1941), 369-370; Rosemary Hughes, “Two Haydn Masses,” The Musical Times, volume 91, issue 1288 (June 1950), 215; Howard Chandler Robbins Landon, The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn (London: Universal Edition & Rockliff, 1955), 602; Cornell Jesse Runestad, The Masses of Joseph Haydn: A Symphonic Study (DMA dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1970), 181-185 (elements reproduced in parentheses are not mentioned explicitly in the text, but are taken from a graph incorrectly claiming to reproduce details found in Landon, Symphonies of Haydn, 1955); Kenneth James Nafziger, The Masses of Haydn and Schubert: A Study of the Rise in Musical Romanticism (DMA dissertation, University of Oregon, 1971), 104-105; Thomas Gordon Gibbs Jr., A Study of Form in the Late Masses of Joseph Haydn (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1972), 137, 165-168 (What Gibbs does not say is as revealing as what he says: his analyses of Haydn's other Kyrie movements are split into groups, roughly corresponding with thematic areas, with the sole exception of the Theresienmesse); Howard Chandler Robbins Landon, “Haydn: The Years of the Creation 1796-1800,” volume 4 in Haydn: Chronicle and Works (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 526-527; Friedhelm Krummacher, “Symphonische Verfahren in Haydns späten Messen,” Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Geschichte, Ästhetik, Theorie: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Hermann Danuser, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Silke Leopold and Norbert Miller (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1988), 461; Howard Chandler Robbins Landon and David Wyn Jones, Haydn: His Life and Music (London: Thames & Hudson), 342-343; Suzanne Litzel, “Die Messen Haydns, Mozarts und Beethovens: ein Beitrag zur Gattungsgeschichte der Messe,” PhD dissertation, Technische Universität Berlin, 1990; Jeremiah Walker R. McGrann, “Beethoven’s Mass in C, Opus 86: Genesis and Compositional Background” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1991), 129-130; Lawrence Schenbeck, Joseph Haydn and the Classical Choral Tradition (Chapel Hill: Hinshaw Music), 272-273; Keith Ernest Pedersen, “The Sonata/Fugue in Haydn's Sacred Choral Music” (DMA dissertation, University at Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), 129-130; Robert W. Demaree and Don V Moses, The Masses of Joseph Haydn – History, Style, Performance (Rochester Hills: Classical Heritage), 573-576; Raohl Gehringer, Die späten Messen von Joseph Haydn: Struktur, Stilmittel und Rhetorik (Saarbrücken: Av Akademieverlag, 2014), 53-56 (Gehringer places the borders between sections at slightly different places than the other writers, and auxiliary bar numbers have therefore been added to this entry); Chester L. Alwes, A History of Western Choral Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 341-342.
4 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
himself was reluctant to embrace this explanation, even if he never really offered an alternative; in his later treatments of the movement he regarded the “Christe” section as a “proper 2nd subject”, but he never labeled the fugal exposition as a “1st subject.”7
Table 1: Overview of Previous Analyses of the Theresienmesse Kyrie 1-8 9-29 29-37 37-51 52-65 66-75 75–91 92-104 (adagio) (allegro) (adagio) Schnerich Introductory adagio Fugal section Christe solo Continuation of fugal section Abbreviated 1892 quartet introduction Schnerich Outer part Fugue Christe solo [Fugue] Abbreviated 1899 [Außensätze]/Adagio 'episode' adagio Schnerich Introduction Fugal [fugierter Satz] Christe solo [Fugal] Abbreviated 1909 'episode' introduction Pohl/Botstiber Adagio introduction Allegro movement ending in fugue [Adagio] 1927 Brand 1939 Intro part 1 Intro Part 2 Fugue Episode? (a) Fugue Intro part 2 (a) [Zwischensatz] (a) Hughes 1950 Slow (a) Double fugato Traditional [Double?] Fugato (B) introduction (B) middle section (A) (a, C) Landon 1955 Introduction Fugue 2nd-subject-like Fugue Introduction episode Runestad 1970 (A, slow intro) Exposition Transitional Recapitulation First theme Second section/ First theme (A, slow intro) theme development Nafziger 1971 Adagio A B (second A [Adagio] theme) Gibbs 1973 Adagio (a) Fugue (part 1) (a) Fugue (part 2) Fugal reprise Adagio (part 3) return (a) Landon 1977 Slow introduction Middle section Introduction (a + b) Introduction (b) Fugue (a) 'a kind of Fugue [a] (a) second subject' (b) Krummacher (a+b) Fugue I (a') Middle section Fugue II (a') (a+b) 1988 (b) 1-8 (adagio) 9-29 29-37 37-51 52-65 66-7 75–91 92-104 (allegro) (adagio) Landon/Jones Adagio (b) Fugal exposition (c, related second subject Development (a [sic]) Adagio 1988 introduction to a) (b) return [a not (a) mentioned] Litzel 1990 Adagio Outer fugal section (b’) Fugato (b) Outer fugal exposition (b’) [Adagio] (a) (b [bars 9-16 Fugal [?] Second theme Development Fugal [a+b?] olny]) exposition recapitulation McGrann 1991 Slow introduction A section B section Short A section Reprise of development slow introduction Schenbeck A (adagio) B (fugue) A (adagio) 1996 Pedersen 1997 Intro Exposition Development Recapitulation Theme 1 Theme 2 Theme 1 Conclusion Demaree and Adagio Allegro Compressed Moses 2009 Adagio Orchestral Section 2 First Second Third unit: Fourth unit: ritornello subsection: subsection: ? tonally Final fugal (Section 1) Fugal unstable unit + flurry fugal exposition Gehringer Prelude (1-4) Introduction Fugue 1 Christe (a) Fugue 2 [reprise?1] End (92-99) 2014 (A) (5-28) (a) (B) & coda (100- 1) (A) Alwes 2015 Adagio A (choral) B (solo voices) A (choral) Adagio
7 Landon and Jones, Haydn: His Life and Music, 342-343.
1 This text uses the word “Reprise”, which in German might mean both repetition and recapitulation. 5 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
Writers have on occasion adopted some sonata form nomenclature, but added that the movement is also ruled by other structural elements, essentially freeing them from the constraints of actual sonata-form analysis: Rosemary Hughes understood the work as a palindrome;8 Landon invoked the French overture, drawing support from the Symphony No. 15, at the time of Theresienmesse more than forty years old;9 Runestad saw the tripartite textual form as preventing the restatement of the secondary theme, even if the Nikolaimesse gives a fine example of how this can be done;10 Chester L. Alwes called the decision to include a concluding adagio “Illustrative of the crossover between symphonic process and Mass composition”11 – a claim that surely deserved an explanation that was never given; finally, authors such as Friedhelm Krummacher and Robert W. Demaree and Don V Moses have altogether avoided sonata terminology, instead preferring less prescriptive vocabulary. These solutions are heterodox, and I argue that the problems they propose to solve are largely illusory.12
Given the efforts of so many scholars to identify sonata-form attributes in the Theresienmesse, it is surprising to see that only one attempt at a thorough sonata-form analysis has been made: whereas Runestad had identified the basic components of the movement, a fully fleshed-out analysis did not appear until the 1997 DMA dissertation of Keith Ernest Pedersen, which explores the movements synthesizing aspects of sonata form and fugue in Haydn’s sacred works, which he labels sonata/fugues. If one accepts Runestad’s or even Landon’s basic dicta it is hard to see how one could arrive at very different results, and Pedersen’s analysis may therefore stand in for all its predecessors as the main foil in this article.
For a modern analyst this analysis is plagued by a number of problems. From a traditional sonata-
8 Hughes, “Two Haydn Masses,” 215.
9 Landon, Symphonies of Joseph Haydn, 603.
10 Runestad, Masses of Haydn, 181. In the Nikolaimesse, “Christe eleison” is set to the secondary theme, and the form itself a sonata form without a development section; in the recapitulation this theme is retexted to retain the textual ABA scheme.
11 Alwes, Western Choral Music, 342.
12 Several sources reproduce aspects of these arguments. See, for instance, Nafziger, Masses of Haydn and Schubert, 103-105; Gibbs, Form in the Late Haydn Masses, 138; Landon, Years of the Creation, 527; Landon and Wyn Jones, Haydn Life and Music, 343.
6 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
form perspective Pedersen’s analysis is problematic for its lack of a secondary theme in the recapitulation, which is a violation of Edward T. Cone’s “sonata principle.”13 This has presented a challenge to analysts that nobody has managed to solve without adding analytical epicycles, essentially conceding that the movement does not work as a regular sonata-form movement.
The movement also contains other formal oddities. The slow introduction is disproportionately long, and parts of it is inexplicably repeated at the end. At the same time, the development section is minuscule and the recapitulation incomplete, making for a very lop-sided movement. To be sure, none of these phenomena are foreign to Haydn, but in this case, virtually every aspect of the form is rendered problematic. In light of this, Landon’s reluctance to commit fully to a sonata reading seems understandable.
Caplin’s theory reveals yet further problems. According to Caplin, a primary theme has to begin and end in the home key,14 yet in Pedersen’s analysis the supposed primary theme modulates to the dominant. If present, this modulation is by definition handled in the transition,15 a concept that Pedersen does away with entirely by jumping straight from “Theme 1” to “Theme 2.”16 The choice of primary theme is also problematic for a subtler reason. One of Caplin's most useful innovations is his refinement of Schoenberg's concept of thematic looseness. Briefly summarized, a tightly-knit theme exhibits “conventional theme-types, harmonic-tonal stability, a symmetrical grouping structure, form-functional efficiency, and a unity of melodic-motivic material,” whereas a loose theme is “characterized by the use of non-conventional thematic structures, harmonic-tonal instability (modulation, chromaticism), an asymmetrical grouping structure, phrase-structural extension and expansion, form-functional redundancy, and a diversity of melodic-motivic
13 James Webster, “Sonata form,” The New Grove, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: MacMillan), volume 23, 693-694. The term has been criticized in James Hepokoski, “Beyond the Sonata Principle,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, volume 55 (2002), number 1. For an excellent new take on the sonata principle as applied in Haydn’s music, see Matthew Riley, “The Sonata Principle Reformulated for Haydn Post-1770 and a Typology of his Recapitulatory Strategies,” Journal of the Royal Music Association, volume 140 (2015), number 1, 1-39.
14 Caplin, Classical Form, 195-196.
15 Ibid., 125.
16 This nomenclature is used consistently in Pedersen’s analyses, and does not represent an attempt at escaping the strictures of sonata form through using less prescriptive terms.
7 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
material.”17 The theory does not only provide a vocabulary for talking about the inner construction of themes, but predicts their use: with rare exceptions, a secondary theme is looser than the primary theme it follows.18 In Pedersen’s reading, on the other hand, one ends up with a primary theme that is extremely loose, but a relatively tightly knit secondary theme.
Table 2 demonstrates a reading conforming with form-functional principles based on Caplin’s theory, as well as certain aspects of Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory. It should be easy to see how this analysis breaks profoundly with the Runestad/Pedersen tradition. There are several aspects of this analysis that might seem problematic, such as the view that the primary theme is contained in the slow introduction, the “Christe” section is considered part of the development section, and the fugal section includes both the transition and the secondary theme. The rest of this article will argue that these apparent analytic problems can be explained in light of norms for traditional Kyrie setting, as these diverge from codified sonata form by using a small number of hitherto uncodified formal types and strategies. In some cases, these diverge from the codified instrumental conventions on a thematic level, which makes the descriptive powers of Caplin’s theory very useful. Once these differences are understood, many of the problems associated with the movement (and to some extent with the genre as a whole) disappear.
Tab e 2: S gges ed rereading of he The e ienme e K ie
1-8 (adagio) 9-29 29-37 37-51 51-52 52-65 66-75 75 91 92-104 (allegro) (adagio)
Sec ion In d c i n E i i n ( a i n 1) De el men ( a i n 2) Reca i la i n ( a i n 3, e e ed)
F g e F gal En ie n F gal T nca ed f gal e i i n (fif h d minan → de el men e i i n → en e → h m h n ed ndan ) h m h n
Theme O che al P ima heme T an i i n → Sec nda Ve igial P (c n a ing T an i i n/ T an i i n/ P ima heme in d c i n heme in men al middle) ec nda ec nda
(c nden ed ima C n in -e i i n TR(?) heme heme heme heme) (de el men )
17 Caplin, Classical Form, 97; in the present repertoire, a possible exception may be found in the Kyrie of Mozart's Mass in C minor.
18 Ibid., 255, 257; this idea has seen its most complete treatment so far in Caplin, “What are Formal Functions?,” 34- 39.
8 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
III. Kyrie Taxonomies: Establishing the Repertoire
The question of whether single-movement Kyries even form a coherent repertoire is not without merit. Even the act of establishing it as such presents significant obstacles, as the vast majority of composers writing sacred music at the time have received little or no attention in contemporary music scholarship.19 For this study, the works of Haydn and two of his most important Viennese contemporaries, Dittersdorf and Waṅhal, have been considered.20 Waṅhal, who was the most prolific Viennese composer of sacred music of his generation, and by whom several works have appeared in print, will be used for generic examples.21
One might question the wisdom of suggesting a uniquely Viennese tradition of sacred music, as sacred music did travel, if on a limited scale compared to secular music.22 What of Mozart and Michael Haydn in Salzburg? Bruce MacIntyre has noted that masses from Salzburg drew upon instrumental forms that one does not find in Viennese Kyries from the same time, such as rondo forms,23 and as a consequence one finds here a break with strict adherence to the textual ABA scheme at an earlier date than in Vienna. This suggests that one may indeed speak of a Viennese tradition, that, at the very least, was formally distinct from the Salzburg tradition, which justifies the omission of Michael Haydn and Mozart’s Salzburg works. Likewise, terse Missa Brevis settings,
19 See, for instance, Friedrich W. Riedel’s overview over composers who wrote sacred music in the Habsburg lands (“Liturgische Formen und kirchenmusikalische Gattungen,” Mozart und die geistliche Musik in Süddeutschland, edited by Friedrich W. Riedel, Sinzig: Studio, 2010, 124-125).
20 An overview of Waṅ hal's sacred music can be found in my doctoral thesis, “His Name Immortal – Five Studies in the Sacred Music of Johann Baptist Waṅ hal” (University of Auckland, 2019). I regard sixty works as having Waṅ hal as the most likely composer, but only twenty of these can stylistically be said to be by him beyond reasonable doubt. These will be organized by Nokki numbers, which will replace the highly deficient Weinmann numbers. All of the works by Waṅhal discussed here can be dated to the 1770s or early 1780s through their presence in historical music catalogues. For Dittersdorf, no attempt at a cataloguing of his efforts has been made since Carl Krebs, Dittersdorfiana (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1900).
21 Some omissions are obvious: Leopold Hofmann adhered to older styles of writing in his sacred music, possibly owing to the historical prestige of his office as Kapellmeister in the Stephansdom; for all their musical differences, one could say the same about his successor, Albrechtsberger. Salieri, on the other hand, largely wrote his sacred works in the nineteenth century, by which time some of Haydn’s later works had already appeared in print. The two remaining major composers of this generation in Vienna, Steffan and Ordonez, wrote little sacred music.
22 What is more, all three composers worked in other places than Vienna for significant parts of their careers.
23 Bruce C. MacIntyre, The Viennese Concerted Mass of the Early Classical Period (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1986), 205.
9 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
minor-mode works and movements whose inner workings appear independent of the tripartite textual scheme have not been considered, as these seem best understood on a case-by-case basis.
What remains, then, is the repertoire of large-scale settings commonly recognized as missa longae or (somewhat inaccurately) missa solemnes from the most central composers of modern, secular music in Vienna and the surrounding lands, who simultaneously could point to a significant production of sacred works. Together they show what would have been acceptable praxis for the progressive composers of instrumental music born in the 1730s. To regard the similarities of their works as evidence of a particular “school of thinking” therefore has some merit.
IV. Kyrie Taxonomies: Introductions
It has often been noted that the slow introductions found in Kyrie movements are roughly analogous to the symphonic slow introduction, and a tempo introductions are construed as ritornello-like openings similar to the double exposition in a concerto. A resemblance between the opening adagios of the late masses – including the one in the Theresienmesse – and the slow introductions of the London symphonies has often been noted.24 Scholars have seldom taken the time to examine such supposed resemblances, and from a form-functional perspective the differences are more striking than the similarities.25 Indeed, whereas Caplin rightfully stressed the phrase-structural diverseness and unpredictability of slow introductions,26 the introductions found in the masses are quite homogeneous.27 This is not always obvious from Haydn’s masses, as the later works finally seem to explode the limits imposed by the traditional mass form – and the Theresienmesse is indeed the cusp of this development. If Caplin’s analysis of the slow
24 Landon, Years of The Creation, 526; James W. McKinnon et al., “Mass,” New Grove, volume 16, 80; “Messen,” Das Haydn-Lexikon, edited by Armin Raab, Christine Siegert and Wolfram Steinbeck (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2009), 508.
25 What is more, Ethan Haimo has noted that one does not find any radical breaks with earlier formal procedures in the slow introductions found in Haydn’s late symphonies. (Haydn's Symphonic Forms – Essays in Compositional Logic, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, 208) Even if the slow introductions found in Kyrie movements greatly resembled those of the symphonies, it would be hard to prove that the London symphonies specifically were seminal.
26 Caplin, Classical Form, 203-208.
27 MacIntyre (The Viennese Concerted Mass, 138-152) mentions other options, but these had vanished well before the 1780s, and need not concern us here. It is admittedly problematic in this respect that so many of the works of his contemporaries cannot be dated, but the above has been conducted using the best knowledge available.
10 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
introduction from Symphony No. 104, with its modulatory scheme and multi-theme construction, is kept in mind during the discussion below, this should be enough to convince most of their generic differences.28
Bruce MacIntyre states, “one need only to recall the Kyries of Haydn's earlier Masses such as the St. Cecilia Mass of 1766 and the Missa Cellensis of 1782 … to realize that there were indeed earlier precedents to Haydn’s later introductions.”29 These largely correspond to what is seen in the works of Haydn’s closest contemporaries, as illustrated by the slow introduction in Waṅhal's mass Weinmann XIX:C7/Nokki 10 (see Example 1).30 Waṅhal's introduction is a no-nonsense example that shows the formal structure typical of Kyrie movements with admirable clarity: It is formed as a single sentence, ending with a half cadence and a standing on the dominant at the end; the largest difference from the standard model is the use of an extended cadential progression (or E.C.P.) that fuses the continuation and cadential functions,31 and the extension of the standard eight-bar sentence through a long standing on the dominant; the choir is present throughout. This seems to be the basic shape of a slow introduction as used by Waṅhal and Dittersdorf. In addition to their near-universal form as a single sentence, slow introductions to Kyrie movements are generally shorter and more tightly knit than their symphonic counterparts; modulations, or even tonicizations going further than a single secondary dominant, are absent.
Haydn’s slow Kyrie introductions up to this point largely fit into the same mold, even if one sees a gradual increase in formal irregularities. The older Mariazellermesse introduction (see Example 2) strongly resemble the example from Waṅhal seen above, even if it distorts the basic sentence structure by adding a one-bar thematic introduction (or is it rather a three-bar basic idea?) and
28 Caplin, Classical Form, 207. One finds a rare exception in Ditters’ mass Krebs 327. Here, the slow introduction of twenty-seven bars contain three sections, the first being set in octave strings alone, and a final cadence on V/vi. What is more, the main idea of this introduction is only alluded to in the Kyrie but is reused as the subject the concluding Dona nobis fugue. Whatever Ditters’ reasons for this unusual choice were, it is not reflected in his remaining works.
29 Bruce C. MacIntyre, “Viennese Common Practice in the Early Masses of Joseph Haydn,” Joseph Haydn – Bericht uber den Internationalen Joseph Haydn Kongress, Wien, Hofburg, 5.-12. September 1982, edited by Eva Badura- Skoda (Munich: G. Henle Verlag), 491; See also MacIntyre, The Viennese Concerted Mass, 139.
30 I have attempted to keep the harmonic annotations in the examples free of details that are not pertinent to the matter at hand, such as in cases where a harmony is prolonged through inversions and/or mediant relationships.
31 Caplin, Classical Form, 45-47.
11 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
reduces the size of the continuation. The Heiligmesse introduction (see Example 3) is constructed as a more regular sentence, but is extended by a long standing on the dominant. In the Missa in tempore belli (see Example 4) one finds the same basic model, but now with a number of complicating features. Most obviously, the dynamics are lowered to piano, and the texture is denser motivically. Form-functionally, the basic structure of a single sentence is still in place, but it is elaborated in a number of ways, the most confusing of which is perhaps the apparent fragmen- tation where one would expect the repetition of the basic idea; the actual length of the opening basic idea is thrown into doubt by the orchestral half-bar that precedes the entry of the voices, and this is further complicated by the ensuing contraction of the idea itself. One might even ask if one can speak of a repetition of the basic idea here, or if the increased melodic rhythm means that the continuation is already under way. If not, one must observe that the tonic pedal in bar 4 is undercut by the introduction of the lowered seventh, and it therefore seems most reasonable to regard the restatement of the basic idea as limited to bar 3.32 Bars 3-9 are animated by a descent through the chromatically enriched tetrachord c-G. In bars 5-6, opening basic idea is thrown into doubt by the orchestral half-bar that precedes the entry of the voices, and this is further complicated by the ensuing contraction of the idea itself. One might even ask if one can speak of a repetition of the basic idea here, or if the increased melodic rhythm means that the continuation is already under way. If not, one must observe that the tonic pedal in bar 4 is undercut by the introduction of the lowered seventh, and it therefore seems most reasonable to regard the restatement of the basic idea as limited to bar 3.33 which are separated by a fermata, the chromatic descent allows IV6 to be reinterpreted as iv6, and Haydn uses this as an opportunity to shift into the minor mode, which is maintained through the rest of the introduction.34
32 Pre-dominant harmonies are occasionally found to prolong I in basic idea statements if a dominant harmony follows in the ensuing statement (Caplin, Classical Form, 38-39). While iv6 is technically followed by a V here, this only happens when the cadential progression is under way. To see everything before this as a prolongation of I seems unreasonable.
33 Pre-dominant harmonies are occasionally found to prolong I in basic idea statements if a dominant harmony follows in the ensuing statement (Caplin, Classical Form, 38-39). While iv6 is technically followed by a V here, this only happens when the cadential progression is under way. To see everything before this as a prolongation of I seems unreasonable.
34 Haydn might not have been the first composer to introduce this shift: Waṅhal used it in the undated work Weinmann XIX:D4/Nokki 21. Waṅhal wrote most of his large-scale masses no later than in the mid-1780s, but this work is conspicuously absent in the locations known to have gathered these works, such as the monasteries of Osek, Rajhrad and Strahov. It is possible that this is a later work, and the use of monothematicism in the Kyrie suggests an indebtedness to Haydn that may well mean it post-dates Haydn’s late masses.
12 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
Example 1: Waṅhal, Missa solemnis, bars 1–16 (edited by Allan Badley, Wellington: Artaria Editions, 2001)
13 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
Example 2: Mariazellermesse, Kyrie, bars 1-8
Example 3: Heiligmesse, Kyrie, bars 1-12
14 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
Example 4: Missa in tempore belli, Kyrie, bars 1-10
15 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
The introductions surveyed so far resemble Waṅhal's “archetype.” They are, however, characterized by thicker motivic textures, more diverse dynamics and eventually by the addition of a tonal swing to the tonic minor. Despite this, they remain much closer to the mass tradition evinced by the Waṅhal example from a form-functional perspective than to Haydn’s symphonic introductions. There is therefore something to be said for understanding their development as being part of a gradual change in how the slow introduction was employed in Kyrie movements. Although one must be wary of teleological assessments, it appears that Haydn was gradually increasing the complexity (and perplexity!) of his introductions. In the Theresienmesse he finally transcended the limitations of this form, but in a different way than has previously been assumed.
Slow introductions were not the only way to start a Kyrie. One frequently finds instrumental a tempo introductions. These were always performed without participation of the voices, but even if this means that the vocal parts (normally the chorus) enters on material previously stated one looks in vain for anything truly resembling a concerto double exposition, despite insistence to the contrary in the literature.35 Instead, a tempo introductions took on a somewhat different form. As in the Kyrie slow introduction, one usually finds only a single thematic unit, and like the slow introduction it will virtually always be a sentence or a sentence-like hybrid.36 Such introductions are most often built on the primary theme, but may also draw material from other themes. In such cases, one can normally find a reason why adding other material was necessary. Here, such introductions are called orchestral introductions, to separate them from the previous type of introduction, where the choir invariably participates. Again one might go to Waṅhal for an example (see Example 5). In his Missa Pastoralis, the bucolic primary theme is first presented in an instrumental form, before being introduced in its proper form in the choir. In this introduction,
35 See, for instance, Demaree and Moses, Masses of Joseph Haydn: “When Mac Intyre writes that Viennese composers using that sort of ‘monmodulating ritornello which is integrated into the choral Kyrie’ and notes that ‘quite often the melodic material of the ritornello is the same of an embroidered version of that sung by the chorus,’ he is apparently acknowledging that designs like these have a concerto-like nature.” (281); “The first fifteen bars [of the Kyrie in Haydn’s Nelson mass], all in D minor and functioning like a Baroque ritornello, constitute the first exposition… Now follows that second exposition – the traditional ‘solo exposition’ in the concerto form…” (511-12); “Once again [in the Harmoniemesse] one finds Haydn employing the double-exposition aspect of the eighteenth- century concerto form in a Kyrie.” (692). MacIntyre likewise speaks of “unifying ritornellos” as an example of “Concerto elements” in the mass (Viennese Concerted Mass, 568).
36 As the form more or less demands a continuation function, hybrid 1 (antecedent + continuation) and hybrid 3 (compound basic idea + continuation) themes might be found (Caplin, Classical Form, 63); the latter is used to open the Nikolaimesse.
16 Hosar, Halvor K. “The Kyrie as Sonata Form: A Form-Functional Approach to Haydn’s Theresienmesse.” HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 10.1 (Spring 2020), http://haydnjournal.org. © RIT Press and Haydn Society of North America, 2020. Duplication without the express permission of the author, RIT Press, and/or the Haydn Society of North America is prohibited.
Example 5a: Waṅhal, Missa Pastoralis (edited by Allan Badley, Wellington: Artaria Editions, 2001), bars 20-35 (Audio is bars 1-35)